writing

It will be very long before political subjects will be reduced to geometric certitude. At present the reasoning on them is a kind of arithmetic of infinity, when the best information, the coolest head, and clearest mind can only approach the truth. A cautious man should therefore give only sibylline predictions, if, indeed, he should hazard any. But I am not a cautious man. I therefore give it as my opinion that they will issue the paper currency, and substitute thereby depreciation in the place of bankruptcy, or, rather, suspension. Apropos of this currency, this papier terré, now mort et enterré, the Assembly have committed many blunders which are not to be wondered at. They have taken genius instead of reason for their guide, adopted experiment instead of experience, and wander in the dark because they prefer lightning to light.

Oh, that concluding sentence! Those old-time poet-statesmen make me swoon like a teenage girl. They weren’t just lawyers and they weren’t MBA’s: they had literary educations that included a knowledge of Greek and Latin. They knew poetry not as gut-spilling splotches of formless free verse but as a craft with a prosody that included rhyme and meter. They were taught to read it and write it, in English and the Classical languages. They didn’t have TV and the Internet so they had nothing to do with their spare time but read Shakespeare, Gibbon and Thucydides. Three cheers for progress! We have cable news and Twitter.

But beyond the pleasure of Dreyer’s prose and authorial tone, I think there is something else at play with the popularity of his book. To put it as simply as possible, the man cares, and we need people who care right now.

Oh, no. Surely not. No, please don’t…!

Our current era is marked by cynicism and nihilism—it goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, that we managed to elect the worst person in the world as president, a con artist and pathological liar who will say anything to stay in the public consciousness and keep the inverted pyramid of his shabby criminal empire from toppling down onto his empty head. Trump is an avatar of everything impermanent, incompetent, and insincere about this era, and I believe there’s a great inchoate hunger for the opposite, for someone who thinks that words and ideas matter.

Sigh. He did it. Yes, of course, if a literary style guide becomes a surprise bestseller, it must have something to do with Donald Trump, the star at the center of the bien-pensant solar system. A moment’s reflection would remind us that Steven Pinker, to name one example, also wrote a bestselling style guide in 2014, suggesting that there may just be a sizable audience with a perennial interest in the craft of writing regardless of political trends, an audience that, shockingly, might not spend every conscious moment obsessing over Donald Trump. Frankly, this kind of “praise” is a philistine insult. It reduces a thoughtful consideration of language and writing to just another emoticon in the frivolous chatter of the news cycle. A book on stylish writing, grown women wearing ridiculous pussy hats — they’re just interchangeable symbols of self-indulgent #resistance. I’m afraid the barbarians are already inside the gates of the literary imagination.

One thing to add: Writers who are not so adept at linking their sentences habitually toss in a “But” or a “However” to create the illusion that a second thought contradicts a first thought when it doesn’t do any such thing. It doesn’t work, and I’m on to you.

Funny enough, I’ve recently encountered the mirror-image problem — using an agreeable word to preface disagreement. The Lady of the House has a cousin who works in marketing for a mega-corporation, and he was telling us how, in recent communication training, they were strongly encouraged to use the word “and” instead of “but” — the latter being too abrupt, too argumentative, too likely to shut down discussion and make people feel unappreciated. “And that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard!” you probably said, with an unwelcoming look of disdain on your face. See, that’s why you’re having trouble climbing the corporate ladder. You’re too belligerent and confrontational. Perhaps you need to try some trust-building exercises.

Meanwhile, the president of the United States thinks “seperation” is a word, once referred to his own wife on Twitter as “Melanie” instead of “Melania” and has explained his personal philosophy of capitalization by declaring: “I capitalize certain words only for emphasis, not b/c they should be capitalized!” (He also uses exclamation points like a text-crazed teenager, but that is another issue.)

As it happens, a reader emailed me last week, wondering if I had indeed meant to title a recent post “They Know What’s Best for You and I.” I greatly appreciated his discreet efforts to help me maintain a respectable appearance, like a pal calling your attention to the fact that you returned from the restroom with a yard of toilet paper stuck to your heel, but yes, I replied, I was quoting a lyric in that title and thus favored fidelity to the source over grammatical accuracy. (Later on in that same song, Mark Sandman sang, even more awkwardly, “They’re tryin’ to psyche us up for number World War Three.” I can’t begin to explain that one. It’s not like the modifier had to be misplaced in order to maintain the rhythm.) I added, just for the record, that I often disobey the conventional rules of capitalization in post titles as well. This is purely an idiosyncratic, aesthetic choice. Certain articles, conjunctions and prepositions just don’t look pleasing to me in lowercase, so I capitalize them. (I’ve served time as a paid copywriter, knowing and observing all the rules, so in my own space, I DO WHAT I WANT.) The alternatives — capitalizing each word or simply surrendering and going all-lowercase all the time — strike me as equally unattractive.

As recently as four years ago, I was still a practitioner of “logical punctuation,” an affectation I have since outgrown, as you can see by the fact that the previous comma resides inside the quotation marks. I simply decided I preferred aesthetic tradition to logical precision in this instance. Sometimes my aesthetic compass leads me off toward uncharted frontiers, other times back to the warm embrace of accepted standards. That’s not to say I’m a grammatical anarchist, of course. As I told my correspondent, I tend to be a descriptivist in linguistic matters, though not a contented one. I have one client who lives in Italy, for whom English is a second or third language. Swell guy. Very gregarious and communicative. The problem is, his emails read as if they were assembled by a combination of Google Translate and a thesaurus. The words are spread across the page like highway rumble strips, or even speed bumps, which rattle my eyeballs hard enough to nearly detach my retinas as I traverse each line. Nothing makes me appreciate the rules of syntax more than staring into that abyss in my inbox. And yet we hear and read native English-speakers every day who are scarcely any more coherent. There may be no one true way to use language, but I’m convinced that some ways are more false than others.

To follow that upward ascent and turn his words into lively vessels of spiritual growth, Plato chose to present his philosophical ideas through dialogues. The choice was dictated by the belief that the forward mental motion produced by dialogue was the only way to enliven the verbal message, above the tomb-like rigidity of the dead written word — the sema, or tomb of the word, which we’ve discussed before.

It’s funny how you only notice some obvious things belatedly, once you’re ready for them. I’ve long known of Plato’s famous antipathy to the written word, but the perfunctory reminder here was accompanied by the surprising realization that somewhere along the way, I’ve come to largely agree with him. No, I don’t mean that I’ve KonMari’d all my books or anything. If books are the tombs of thoughts, I’m still quite gothic insofar as I prefer to spend my time brooding in graveyards, playing with bones. But I read mostly nonfiction, and I can’t help but think that for the earnest truthseeker, many contentious topics in that genre would be better illuminated by verbal dialogue than the laborious process of reading the book, searching out critical responses, waiting for the potential rebuttal, etc. It’s like trying to reassemble a vibrant conversation out of dusty fragments. Watching Terry Eagleton and Roger Scruton in dialogue, for example, is subtly but powerfully different than reading either in isolation. So many other topics would flourish more as conversations than monographs.

If the man who tells you that he writes, paints, sculptures, or sings for his own amusement, gives his work to the public, he lies; he lies if he puts his name to his writing, painting, statue, or song. He wishes, at the least, to leave behind a shadow of his spirit, something that may survive him…The man of letters who shall tell you that he despises fame is a lying rascal.

Everyone who writes, I have no doubt, would like to be famous, and not only famous now, while on this earth, but, embarrassing enough to admit given the odds, famous after he has departed the earth. And this, I believe, is true of serious and frivolous writers alike.

Well! I’m not a man of letters, of course; I’m just another vandal tagging the alleyways of the web with my digital graffiti. But as a paid-up member of the Frivolous Writers Local 301, I feel authoritative enough to declare that this is bunk. Unamuno may be talking about the literary equivalent of those ’90s rock stars who, having gone through all the considerable effort of forming a band, gigging regularly, signing to a major label, and heavily promoting their albums, proceeded to gripe incessantly about how stifling and inauthentic it all was. In those cases, yes, it’s hard to take such complaints seriously. If you don’t want fame and fortune, there are plenty of off-ramps to take long before you get to the big time. But why should it be so hard to accept the idea of the devoted amateur who loves his work precisely because it’s not a job with all the trappings and compromises that entails? I could probably adjust to being rich — certainly willing to give it my best effort! — but fame? What on Earth would be the point of that?

Although I’ve had some commercial and critical success with my books, I’ve never written a book at whose completion I felt that, like a gymnast making a perfect landing, I’ve nailed it, a perfect ten. Only a year or more later, when for one reason or another I might open the book and find a passage that pleases me, do I say to myself, “Not bad, not bad at all. I wasn’t stupid when I wrote that. How come I’m so stupid today?”

I feel that way all the time. Apparently I suffer from a type of writer’s farsightedness, where my opinion of my efforts grows in proportion to my temporal distance from it. Up close, I can only see wasted potential and disappointment. “I felt stupid when I wrote that. How come it looks so much smarter in retrospect?” Ah, hindsight — both the torment and the solace of an amateur writer.

Yet I don’t look at those articles and think, “Now there is a passionate writer speaking truth to power!” Rather, I remember that offer I got seven or eight years ago and I assume I’m looking at the words of a writer a lot like me, struggling to pay the bills through the only kind of work they know how to do, trying desperately to get as many clicks and likes and shares as possible to make sure they get paid for this one.

This is why I can’t take most of what I read these days at face value. Because I know how the game of being a professional writer is played. I play it myself. I have to. I know that one of the most abused professions right now is that of being a writer. Few of us are in a position to speak out about it. We’re too busy just trying to stay afloat in the situation these new practices have placed us in.

Hitler sells. Horror sells. Sex sells. Put that together to create the image of real life as a horror movie starring a sex-crazed Adolf Hitler, and you’ve got an article that might to be shared enough times for you to afford to eat this month.

…I’m trying not to become similarly cynical about life itself. And the only way to do that, that I can come up with is to leave those problems the media wants me to freak out about aside and focus instead on what’s right in front of me. Being hyper-aware of problems I can do nothing to solve never brought me any joy, nor did it ever make the slightest difference in those problems.

While moving into this new site, I spent a week or so down in the HTML-basement fixing as much as I could of the linkrot and code-decay that had accumulated over a decade-plus of writing online and a few template changes. After reading all those old posts and looking at all those old links, I came away with the strong impression that in the early part of this decade, pre-Great Awokening, there seemed to be a lot more interesting variety to be found. Google used to have a “blogsearch” function that I would use each day to see where I could find some new, interesting site I’d never seen before. Social media hadn’t yet converged into the monolithic Mall of America that it’s become now, with a couple-dozen big-box content providers and the 24-hour reality show known as Twitter, where psychotic freaks compete to see who can grab fifteen seconds of viral fame before being hunted down by a roving outrage mob. There was a middle ground where independent blogs and unique voices flourished, and I drew a lot of my inspiration from there.

In the blog era, it was known as “nutpicking” — the practice of finding the most extreme, unhinged statement on the outgroup’s side of the web and holding it up for ridicule. And while some bloggers made a popular shtick out of it, it was also considered bad form to a certain extent, like hitting below the belt. Now, that’s almost all there is. Nonstop harvesting of nuts like squirrels preparing for winter. Even people I think of as mostly sane and judicious, like Cathy Young, spend far too much time magnifying and amplifying obnoxious trash from obnoxious people that should really be passed over in disgusted silence. But it’s no fun being disgusted by yourself, in silence, when you can perform your disgust for reward. And intellectual bacteria don’t care how they get passed from host to host, so long as they do. All of this creates the bedlam that we see now. At some point, people who truly want things to change are going to have to understand that there’s no fighting it from within. Urging people to only share worthwhile content is as futile as urging people to not feed the trolls. The structural format of social media is not going to be “hacked” in service to nuance and depth. As the doom-metal troubadour Scott Weinrich sang, “Look at those around you/ Find your better way.” Find it and stick to it. Refuse to feed the social-media Moloch with your energy. Be a better example for whoever is willing to pay attention.

It’s hard, though. I’ve been struggling uphill toward that goal for a few years now, and it doesn’t get easier. Inertia, laziness, the gravitational pull of my own limited talent, they all work against me. It’s so much easier to make a quick wisecrack about the fresh hell du jour than to quietly read hundreds of pages, waiting for the illuminating flash in that one line or passage that heralds a brainstorm. Not that I have anything against jokes, of course. Some things are just funny, and sometimes we just need to laugh at the absurdity of it all. It’s just that, as with anything that’s too easy, complacency is sure to follow. Sometimes I laugh at myself, turning my hobby, of all things, into yet another exertion requiring new reserves of discipline. But then I remember it could always be worse — I could be trying to make a living as a writer and find myself up against the same social and economic pressure that has already turned so many others into pathetic hacks chumming the waters with clickbait. Integrity is quiet and undemonstrative, but it’s always worth the isolation and hard work.

Social media is as compelling as ever, but people are increasingly souring on the surveillance state Skinner boxes like Facebook and Twitter. Decentralized media like blogs and newsletters are looking better and better these days…

There has been a recent movement to “re-decentralize” the web, returning our activities to sites like this one. I am unsurprisingly sympathetic to this as an idealist, and this post is my commitment to renew that ideal. I plan to write more here from now on. However, I’m also a pragmatist, and I feel the re-decentralizers have underestimated what they are up against, which is partially about technology but mostly about human nature.

…It is psychological gravity, not technical inertia, however, that is the greater force against the open web. Human beings are social animals and centralized social media like Twitter and Facebook provide a powerful sense of ambient humanity—the feeling that “others are here”—that is often missing when one writes on one’s own site. Facebook has a whole team of Ph.D.s in social psychology finding ways to increase that feeling of ambient humanity and thus increase your usage of their service.

He notes that most people simply don’t have time to write at length, which is another strong incentive to stick to the minimal demands of Facebook and Instagram. I would add that even if they had the time, most people are not particularly driven to philosophize about the world and articulate those thoughts in medium-to-long-form essays. As always, that doesn’t mean they’re stupid or shallow; it’s just that regular writing, even of the amateur variety, is a discipline like any other, and very few people have the odd single-mindedness necessary to stick to a discipline with military precision and religious zeal. Most people would want to be compensated for the time and energy they invest in writing with money, attention, or both, and as he says, the centralized web is far more efficient at providing those opportunities. Was it ever about writing per se, or was it just about self-expression? If the latter, well, that can be accomplished through sentence fragments, photos and videos in much less time. As a fellow who would surely know put it, “Convenience decides everything.” Easy is better, easiest is best.

There may well be a fair number of other oddballs out there who can find the motivation to write in nothing more than self-contained aesthetic enjoyment, but, largely by definition, they’re not going to attract notice. Or, to put it another way, there might be plenty of people who are happy to maintain blogs, but blogging itself is never going to be a cultural “thing” again, except possibly in the aspirational sense — having a blog might signify authenticity by virtue of its old-fashioned impracticality, like so many other status symbols. In a best-case scenario, perhaps in the spirit of Morris Berman’s New Monastic Individuals, blogs might come to be another redoubt of those who choose to turn their backs and walk away from the cult of convenience. That will always be a tiny minority, though.

Yet, a popular question today is whether blogs still have any relevance. A quick Google search will yield suggested results, “are blogs still relevant 2016,” “are blogs still relevant 2017,” and “is blogging dead.”

…Today, writers lament the irrelevance of blogs not just because there’s too many of them; but because not enough people are engaging with even the more popular ones. Blogs are still important to those invested in their specific subjects, but not to a more general audience, who are more likely to turn to Twitter or Facebook for a quick news fix or take on current events.

Explains author Gina Bianchini as she advises not starting a blog, “2017 is a very different world than 2007. Today is noisier and people’s attention spans shorter than any other time in history…and things are only getting worse. Facebook counts a ‘view’ as 1.7 seconds and we have 84,600 of those in a day. Your new blog isn’t equipped to compete in this new attention-deficit-disorder Thunderdome.”

Suits me fine. Hermits have long been known for dwelling among ruins, or meditating in cemeteries. As my copy of the Tao Te Ching says:

The people of the world excitedly run about as if they were going to miss the yearly, royal, sacrificial feast, or as if they were going to be the last one to climb a high tower on a beautiful spring day.
I alone remain quiet and indifferent.
I anchor my being to that which existed before Heaven and Earth were formed.
I alone am innocent and unknowing, like a newborn babe.
Unoccupied by worldly cares, I move forward to nowhere.
The people of the world have more than enough.
I alone appear to have nothing.
The people of the world appear shrewd and wise.
I alone look foolish.
I like to be forgotten by the world and left alone.

If only it were true, though. I’m reminded of a Suicidal Tendencies lyric: “Why should they be resting so peacefully when we’re up above in pure misery?” With regard to the dearly departed, it’s terribly difficult to pay your respects when all these graverobbers keep disinterring the supposedly–irrelevant corpse for their deviantnecrophilicpurposes.

I write in my notebook with the intention of stimulating good conversation, hoping that it will also be of use to some fellow traveler. But perhaps my notes are mere drunken chatter, the incoherent babbling of a dreamer. If so, read them as such.

Vox Populi

The prose is immaculate. [You] should be an English teacher…Do keep writing; you should get paid for it, but that’s hard to find.

—Noel

You are such a fantastic writer! I’m with Noel; your mad writing skills could lead to income.

—Sandi

WOW – I’m all ready to yell “FUCK YOU MAN” and I didn’t get through the first paragraph.

—Anonymous

You strike me as being too versatile to confine yourself to a single vein. You have such exceptional talent as a writer. Your style reminds me of Swift in its combination of ferocity and wit, and your metaphors manage to be vivid, accurate and original at the same time, a rare feat. Plus you’re funny as hell. So, my point is that what you actually write about is, in a sense, secondary. It’s the way you write that’s impressive, and never more convincingly than when you don’t even think you’re writing — I mean when you’re relaxed and expressing yourself spontaneously.

—Arthur

Posts like yours would be better if you read the posts you critique more carefully…I’ve yet to see anyone else misread or mischaracterize my post in the manner you have.

—Battochio

You truly have an incredible gift for clear thought expressed in the written word. You write the way people talk.